The Volunteer by Michael Ross Read Free Book Online Page A

call up your editor in L.A. I bet he’s worried. You must know the number off the top of your head, right? What’s that? You don’t know your own area code ?”
    I felt the eyes of Halleck’s entourage on me, but they didn’t interrupt the conversation. I was unnerved, and I couldn’t help but feel that I was failing an audition of sorts—a kind of American Idol for spies, if you will—and at that particular moment, I was warbling hideously. After enduring some constructive criticism, I was sent back into the next room with my tail between my legs. Creating a convincing story is not the hard part, I realized. The challenge was in concocting a convincing story that was also virtually impossible to check out.
    It took me several tries, but I eventually hit on something that held up under Halleck’s preliminary probing. I was still a journalist, but for a small Christian community college with a generic-sounding name (this was the era before Google, remember). I was staying at a youth hostel. No, I couldn’t remember its name and there are hundreds in Israel. And I’d checked out that morning anyway. Once my identity and raison d’être had been established, I was bundled into a van with Halleck and some of his retinue, and we drove into the epicenter of a bustling Tel Aviv afternoon.
    There is a scene in the film Spy Game in which Robert Redford, the old CIA hand, takes his protégé, Brad Pitt, onto the streets of Berlin and runs him around to test his smarts. This was more or less what I was doing. I had to appear on a randomly chosen apartment balcony after convincing the tenant to allow me access; get the first three names from a hotel register; start a conversation with a complete stranger and hold his attention for twenty minutes; put a device in a public phone mouthpiece in the heart of the Hilton Hotel lobby without being noticed; and a whole host of other odd but challenging tasks.
    In each case, I had to rely not only on an invented identity—my legend, or “status cover”—but also on what I later learned to refer to as my operational cover, that is, my fictional motive for being in a particular place and doing a particular thing at a particular time. A legend stays with you for years, but an operational cover is often invented on the spot.
    One thing they don’t show you in the spy movies: what the agents do at night. No, I’m not referring to bedding beautiful women with names like Plenty O’Toole and Pussy Galore. When the sun goes down, spies morph into paper-pushing bureaucrats. (I suppose that Canadian government job was good for something.) There is a saying in the Mossad: “If you complete a mission and don’t report it, the mission never happened.” I was instructed to write reports about all of my activities during the day in any format I saw fit (this being 1988, I recorded everything in longhand). By the time my head hit the pillow, I was exhausted.
    As I performed my various tasks over the next couple of days, Halleck and his colleagues sat in cafés and watched me. On the odd occasion, one of them would ask me why I did what I did, and I’d try to explain my thought process. These were not puzzles that had any correct answer. Rather, the idea was to test my judgment and ability to improvise. There was no going back to the office and thinking about it. I had to solve problems then and there.
    In some cases, the tasks seemed plain impossible. But more often than not, I surprised myself. Hotel staff, I knew, would not make a guest registry available to just anyone who asked. So I simply told the desk clerk that I had the camera of one of their guests, and that the young lady had given me her last name but I had forgotten it. “Look,” I said in a pleading tone, “it’s a very expensive camera and I’d like to return it to her . . . and truth be told, I really like her and would like to